Mozilla Foundation Meets The GNOME Foundation

An anonymous reader writes "The board of directors of the GNOME foundation recently met with a few representatives of the Mozilla foundation - discussing how they could collaborate a little closer in future. A number of interesting things were discussed, including XAML/Avalon and the future of Firefox in GNOME/Linux. Check out the minutes of the meeting on the Gnome mailing list."

GNONE-ME

[Anonymous Coward]

That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.

Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.

If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.

I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).

Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.

Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.

Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.

Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.

Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.

We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.

- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,

Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil

Re:Do not annoy the Stallman

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope its GNOME on Linux. The KDE folk do not seem to be very interested with a companionship with Mozilla (probably due to KHtml).

This is hopefully going to combine the best of both technologies into something that could defeat XAML, etc...

Duhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm interesting story, but this happened last year... Just check the date of the message and the members of gnome foundation...

Insightful?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be kidding. While replacing epiphany (the current gnome-browser) with firefox would be a good idea imho, calling the filemanager Nautilus a browser simply is anything but insightful.

Oh, and Konq is pretty awesome as a file-manager and has greatly improved as a web-browser.

Re:I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT)

[akeru]

"better" is a very subjective term, especially as far as Galeon and Epiphany are concerned. The reasons GNOME went with Epi over Galeon are essentially the same as why Marco (lead developer) left Galeon and started Epiphany: the (other) Galeon developers wanted to duplicate a lot of things that were already present in GNOME. The short list of duplication in Galeon/GNOME is MIME, Proxy and Mouse settings. The outcome of this is that there are (at present) 4 choices for a GNOME webbrowser, none of which are ideal.

Recently Met?

[Queuetue]

GNOME Foundation / Mozilla Foundation Meeting Minutes Wednesday, April 21 2003

This was last year!

Re:I find it odd indeed... (slightly OT)

[Jameth]

"I feel your pain. I love Gnome, but I can't help but think that the head developers are a little lost at times. There really isn't a very good sense of group direction and planning... At least compared to KDE, in my opinion."

What's really amazing is that KDE is the one with nothing even resembling central leadership, and GNOME is the one which is generally run by a group of core developers and decision makers. How did that happen?

By the way, you're completely right.

Suggested innovation

[claes]

The meeting suggested innovation - what about this:

Tie XForms together with email. The purpose is to allow forms to be sent with email, as alternative to HTTP POST. Integrate it with mail clients so that clicking a link opens the compose window, which will load the form, show it, ready to fill in. When clicking send, the form is evaluated and sent. This is much nicer than filling in an order form in a browser, since you get to keep a copy in the outbox. Actually, I am surprised I don't see this already. Of course, it needs to be standardized, but you have to start somewhere. Is there perhaps already an RFC in progress?

Re:Is OSS going the Microsoft route?

[iabervon]

Um... KDE is the wrong suggestion. The browser (konqueror) has always been integrated into KDE.

Re:It'd be nice

[mattyrobinson69]

konqueror is not as such, as web browser. it can do anything that there is a kpart for (such as khtml - the web renderer). thats why you can edit text files and listen to music, and view files over smb or nfs through konqueror - thats not duplication of effort. kparts minimises this a lot.

Feh.

[alehmann]

There are so many things wrong with this that it's difficult to start. The first is Jeff Waugh's proposal that Epiphany replace Firefox as a the de-facto Linux browser. Jeff Waugh is GNOME's most extreme evangelist and from my communications with him I get the impression that he would like nothing more than for GNOME to become integral to every Linux system. In reality, all that users would gain from Epiphany is that things might be a little more consistent *if* they happened to use GNOME. If not, too bad:

# apt-get install epiphany-browser
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
docbook-xml docbook-xsl gconf2 gnome-doc-tools gnome-icon-theme gnome-mime-data libbonobo2-0 libbonobo2-common libbonoboui2-0 libbonoboui2-common libeel2-2 libeel2-data libfam0c102 libgconf2-4 libgnome-desktop-2 libgnome2-0 libgnome2-common libgnomeui-0 libgnomeui-common libgnomevfs2-0 libgnomevfs2-common libnautilus2-2 liborbit2 libscrollkeeper0 libxslt1.1 scrollkeeper yelp
Suggested packages:
gnome-vfs-extras2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
docbook-xml docbook-xsl epiphany-browser gconf2 gnome-doc-tools gnome-icon-theme gnome-mime-data libbonobo2-0 libbonobo2-common libbonoboui2-0 libbonoboui2-common libeel2-2 libeel2-data libfam0c102 libgconf2-4 libgnome-desktop-2 libgnome2-0 libgnome2-common libgnomeui-0 libgnomeui-common libgnomevfs2-0 libgnomevfs2-common libnautilus2-2 liborbit2 libscrollkeeper0 libxslt1.1 scrollkeeper yelp
0 upgraded, 28 newly installed, 0 to remove and 83 not upgraded.

...And I already have GTK2 and Gecko installed. You get to keep most of the new stuff resident in memory for no gain.

By the way, even if Epiphany does not become the standard browser, I don't like the direction things are headed in with Firefox becoming the default. The designers seem to have outsourced their UI design to Redmond. Here are a few examples of the things I don't like about Firefox that I feel came directly from IE and really don't jive with my habits that come from using NSCP products for 10 years:

• When you try to add a bookmark, it opens a dialog. Netscape never did this, not even in version 1.0. I much prefer the old way.
• By default, Firefox zooms images that you view directly to fit the screen. When I occasionally used Windows lab machines a few years ago there was nothing I hated more than loading a screenshot and seeing it scaled down. At least you can turn this off in the preferences.
• Both Mozilla and Firefox have adopted favicon.ico from IE. IMHO this is a horrible idea and never had any point. In Mozilla you can turn it off in the preferences dialog. In Firefox, you can partially turn it off using the cryptic about:config.
• "Options" is under "Tools". This is unintuitive. I understand that Edit isn't the best choice either, but it's been that way for a decade.
• When you try to type in a URL, a dropdown of completions appear. Most people like this. I don't. Mozilla lets you turn it off. Firefox doesn't.

And there are many more things I dislike about Firefox, but these are just the ones I feel they took directly from IE. I understand that they want it to be easy for IE users to migrate, but this inflexible browser really doesn't meet the expectations of power users like myself and many of my friends. I've tried to reason with some of the Firefox developers about some of these issues, and they firmly believe that Firefox should cater to the needs of IE converts. They don't want to add preference items for the admittedly minor things I care about because it would confuse people and possibly make Firefox's preferences UI as slow as Mozilla's (XUL doesn't seem very scalable). This is proof that only having one browser is not sufficient, especially if it's a least common denominator one. I haven't used Epiphany, but I can't see how it would be better to remove the choice between Firefox and Epipha

Re:Oh christ.

[evilviper]

The last thing I want is my favorite browser family tied to freaking GTK or Gnome.

Ironically, it already is... Mozilla has always required GTK, and (very few) GNOME libraries.

The fact that you don't realize this suggests that you've probably never compiled Mozilla, and just download the binaries. In which case, you won't be affected in the slightest, anyhow.

Re:It'd be nice

[arkhan_jg]

Grin, I don't think you remember all the facts.
IIRC this is how it went...

NCSA wrote the original mosaic. Spyglass licenced the tech and trademark from NCSA, and wrote spyglass mosaic from the ground up.

(mosaic communications corporation) MCC was a spin off company of a bunch of the staff from NCSA, and after a trademark wrangle they renamed to Netscape.

Spyglass mosaic went down the embedded road, i.e. a rendering engine for other software, netscape went the standalone browser road.

Then came the formation of the W3C, and the (brief) netscape/mosaic wars.

After that, Microsoft licenced spyglass mosaic to use as an addon for windows 95 - IIRC IE2 was basically mosaic, IE3 was a big upgrade, and IE4 was when microsoft rewrote most of it. Of course, by that point microsoft was outspending netscape in a major way, and the rest is well, well known.

But I stand by my original point (which was meant to be a joke) - without competition, we'd all be using mosaic, or as it came to be known, Internet Explorer ;)

Under development

[superyooser]

• XUL Maker [mozdev.org]
• Vixen [mozilla.org]

Re:QT/KDE interface?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some work had been done on this in the past but apparently, no one (either from the KDE or the Mozilla side) really cared for it. In the end, the code was simply removed from the Mozilla source tree because it had bitrotted badly and wasn't being maintained.